The Vision of MacConglinney

Cathal, King of Munster, was a good king and a mighty warrior. But a lawless, greedy beast came to live inside him, and it gave him a hunger that never stopped and could never be filled. For breakfast alone he would gobble a pig, a cow, a bull calf and sixty cakes of fine wheat, and wash them down with a whole vat. As for what he ate at his great evening feast, nobody could count it. For a year and a half he went on like this, and he was eating Munster out of house and home. In another six months he would probably have eaten all Ireland bare.

In Armagh there lived a famous young scholar called Anier MacConglinney. He heard about King Cathal’s strange sickness, and about the heaps of food and drink, the milk dishes and butter and cheese, that were always to be had at the king’s court. So he decided to go there, to try his luck and to see whether he could help the king. He rose early, tucked up his shirt and wrapped himself in his white cloak. He took his well-balanced knotty staff in his right hand, walked sunwise round his home, said goodbye to his teachers and set off.

He crossed the whole of Ireland until he reached the house of a man called Pichan. There he stayed, telling stories and making everyone laugh. But Pichan said, “Your jokes are fine, scholar, but they don’t cheer me.”

“Why not?” asked MacConglinney.

“Don’t you know that Cathal is coming here tonight with all his men? A great host is a heavy burden, and the king’s first meal is heavier still, but heaviest of all is his great feast. For that I need a bushel of oats, a bushel of wild apples and a bushel of flour cakes.”

“What will you give me if I protect you from the king from this hour until the same hour tomorrow?”

“A white sheep from every fold between Carn and Cork.”

“Done,” said MacConglinney.

King Cathal arrived with his companies and a crowd of Munster horsemen. He had hardly half untied the laces of his shoes before he was cramming apples into his mouth with both hands from the heaps around him. Pichan and the men of Munster watched in gloom. Then MacConglinney sprang up, grabbed the whetstone the warriors used to sharpen their swords, pushed it into his mouth and began grinding his teeth on it.

“What has driven you mad, scholar?” asked Cathal.

“It grieves me to see you eating alone,” said MacConglinney.

The king was ashamed and threw him some apples, and people say it was the first kind thing he had done in a year and a half.

“Grant me one more favour,” said MacConglinney.

“I grant it, on my word,” said the king.

“Then fast with me all night.”

It was terribly hard for the king, but he did it, for he had given his royal word, and no King of Munster could break that.

In the morning MacConglinney asked for juicy old bacon, tender corned beef, honey in the comb and English salt on a beautiful polished dish of white silver. He lit a fire of oak wood that gave no smoke, no fumes and no sparks, stuck the meat on spits and began to roast it. Then he shouted, “Ropes and cords here!” He was given ropes and cords and the strongest of the warriors, and they seized the king and tied him tight with knots and hooks and staples.

When the king was well fastened, MacConglinney sat down in front of him, drew his knife from his belt and carved the meat on the spits. He dipped every morsel in honey, waved it in front of the king’s mouth and then popped it into his own. The king, who had not eaten for a day and a night, roared and bellowed and ordered his men to kill the scholar, but nobody did.

“Listen, King of Munster,” said MacConglinney. “Last night I had a vision, and I will tell it to you.” And as he talked, he kept passing morsel after morsel under Cathal’s nose and into his own mouth.

“I saw a lake of new milk in the middle of a lovely plain. On it stood a fine house thatched with butter. Its thatching rods were fresh puddings, its two soft doorposts were custard, its beds were splendid bacon, its fence was made of cheeses and its rafters of sausages. A voice said in my ear, ‘Go there, MacConglinney, for you have lost your appetite.’ The sight had made me greedy, so I asked what I should do. The voice told me to go to the hermitage of the Wizard Doctor, where I would find an appetite for every kind of tasty, tender, sweet food.

“In the harbour of the lake lay a juicy little boat of beef. Its seats were curds, its front was lard, its back was butter and its oars were sides of venison. I rowed across the wide New Milk Lake, through seas of broth, past river mouths of meat, over rolling waves of buttermilk, by pools of savoury lard, by islands of cheese and headlands of old curds, until I landed between Butter Mount and Milk Lake, in the land of O’Early-eating, in front of the Wizard Doctor’s hermitage.

“What a hermitage it was! Round it stood fourteen thousand smooth stakes of old bacon, each one topped with juicy lard instead of thorns. The gate was made of cream, with a sausage for a bolt. There stood the doorkeeper, Bacon Lad, son of Butterkins, son of Lardipole. He wore sandals of old bacon, leggings of potted meat, a tunic of corned beef, a belt of salmon skin and a hood of flummery. He rode a horse of bacon with legs of custard, hoofs of oatcake, ears of curds and eyes of honey. In his hand was a whip whose lashes were twenty-four fat white puddings, and every drop that fell from them would have made a meal for an ordinary man.

“Inside, the Wizard Doctor was tidying his house, which was hung with tripe from roof to floor, and he wore two gloves of rump steak. In the kitchen I saw his son fishing in a lake of whey with a hook of lard on a line of marrow. Up came a ham, then a fillet of corned beef, until he toppled in and was drowned. As I stepped over the threshold, I sat down on a pure white bed of butter and sank into it right up to the tips of my hair. It took the eight strongest men in the house to haul me out by the top of my head.

“Then they brought me to the Wizard Doctor. ‘What is the matter with you?’ he asked. I told him I wished that all the wonderful dishes in the world were set before me so that I could eat my fill, and that it was a great misfortune not to have them.

“‘Upon my word,’ said the Doctor, ‘that is a serious illness. But you shall take home a medicine that will cure you for good. Tonight, warm yourself at a glowing fire of oak on a dry hearth, where the embers warm you, the blaze does not burn you and the smoke does not touch you. Make yourself twenty-seven morsels, each as big as a grouse’s egg, with eight kinds of grain in each, eight seasonings and eight sauces for every seasoning. Then take a little drop to drink, only as much as twenty men could manage, of thick, yellow, bubbling milk that gurgles down your throat. Do this, and whatever is wrong with you will be cured. Go now in the name of cheese, and may smooth juicy bacon, yellow creamy curds and a cauldron of porridge keep you safe.’”

All this time the king had been listening. What with the delight of the tale, all those delicious dishes, and the sweet smell of the honeyed meat on the spits, the lawless beast inside him crept up and up until it was licking its lips outside the king’s mouth. Then MacConglinney held the two spits of food to the king’s lips, and the king longed to swallow them, wood and all. But MacConglinney drew them an arm’s length away, and the greedy beast leapt out of Cathal’s throat and onto the spit.

At once MacConglinney thrust the spit into the embers and turned the great cauldron of the royal house upside down over it. Everyone hurried out of the house until not so much as a beetle’s leg was left inside, and four huge fires were lit in it. When the house was a tower of red flame, the beast sprang up to the roof beam, and from there it vanished and was seen no more.

As for the king, a bed with a downy quilt was made ready for him, and musicians and singers played to him from noon until dusk.

When he woke, he gave the scholar a cow from every farm and a sheep from every house in Munster. What is more, for as long as he lived, MacConglinney was to carve the king’s food and sit at his right hand. So Cathal, King of Munster, was cured of his craving, and the scholar from Armagh was honoured by all.

About this tale

Joseph Jacobs writes in the notes to More Celtic Fairy Tales that Alfred Nutt kindly condensed this tale for him from Professor Meyer’s 1892 edition of The Vision. Meyer printed two Irish versions, a longer one from the fourteenth-century manuscript called the Leabhar Breac or Speckled Book, and a shorter one from a sixteenth-century manuscript in Trinity College, Dublin.

Jacobs compares the tale’s creature of appetite with other folklore accounts. His historical speculation should be distinguished from a verified explanation of appetite or English word origins. He also remembers a similar tale his nurse told him in Australia, and he notes that the Irish monk who wrote The Vision was probably poking fun at the solemn visions told of saints.

Here the king’s vat of ale and mead becomes simply a vat to wash his breakfast down, and the long rhyming lists of food in the vision are shortened and told in prose.

Read the original: Joseph Jacobs, More Celtic Fairy Tales (Project Gutenberg #34453, The Vision of MacConglinney)

Best for ages 9–12 — a funny medieval Irish tale about a greedy king, a clever scholar and a dream made entirely of food.

A kingdom turns into a meal

The opening measures the king’s hunger by what other people must supply. In the vision, almost every useful thing becomes food: a boat, a gate, clothing and even a horse. That excess makes appetite look like an entire world rather than a single large meal. MacConglinney manipulates it through language, smell and physical restraint. The result is comic supernatural satire, not a treatment to imitate for real eating difficulties.

Design an edible object

Choose one object from the vision and explain why its food material is funny or impractical. Invent another object with the same kind of mismatch, then connect the joke to the king’s inability to think beyond eating.

Think about it

• How did MacConglinney trick the beast into coming out of the king?
• Which part of the food vision did you find funniest? Draw or describe your own house made of food.
• Why do you think the king kept his promise to fast even though it was so hard for him?

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• The Story-Teller at Fault — another Irish tale where a story saves the day
• The Field of Boliauns — another comic Irish tale
• The Russet Dog — another tale from More Celtic Fairy Tales